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OK, ... so you rather justify a recipe app accepting chemicals as inputs to blame a news site for their reporting than to identify the problem? Edit: removed a

OK, ... so you rather justify a recipe app accepting chemicals as inputs to blame a news site for their reporting than to identify the problem? Edit: removed a part about The Guardian.

Aachen 3y ago
I'm not sure what the ability to blame the Guardian has to do with anything, I'm basing the above comment solely on this submitted article and don't really know the Guardian as an organisation. I have no beef with them, if I'm reading your tone correctly. As for allowing to input chemicals: garbage in, garbage out. We accept that from tools (and some countries from guns) but not from software. Maybe that's how it should be, but I find it an interesting discrepancy. In general, as a hacker, I'm happy if a tool lets me use it for unintended purposes (such as humor in this case)
- _Microft 3y ago
  OK, I took The Guardian part out but I think the rest is still applicable. Why is the reporting problematic but not that this problem happens in the first place?
  - veave 3y ago
    Because there's no story. It's software that generates recipes from ingredients you provide. If you provide inedible ingredients you get an inedible recipe. What did you expect would happen? The subtext here is journalists who are dead scared of a tool they know will replace them. So they have to denigrate it.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      I think something that's been left unsaid until now is that the implementation is clumsy and downright dangerous, therefore the implementation is totally botched. A supermarket whose job it is to feed people so as to keep them alive is a vital service in the vast majority of economies, and so has the duty to go a little deeper and fine-tune their model or at the very least heavily prompt-engineer their interface layer to avoid such obvious flubs. There's no point in apologizing for the LLM. Of course it's doing what it's asked to do. That's not the gripe, nor points toward any kind of solution, though.
    - Aachen 3y ago
      I agree with the first paragraph but not necessarily the latter. More likely to me seems that the journalists see something that can be construed to be harmful (so they can justify the story), as well as having a high click rate (see, it ends up on HN), and thus good for business
      - saaaaaam 3y ago
        A lot of Guardian readers excoriate the Daily Mail as low quality clickbait and "not journalism", whilst seeming perfectly content to suckle from the teats of the Guardian's own clickbait farm, presumably comforting themselves that there is some sort of intellectual honesty present in the Guardian that is missing from the Daily Mail. I find it quite strange.
        Aachen 3y ago
        Not sure this "us vs. them" stuff / generalising every reader of a website is helping anyone here
        saaaaaam 3y ago
        Not to be pernickety, but I did say “a lot of” not “all of”… And in the context of this conversation which was about clickbait on the guardian I felt it was a contextually valid observation. I’m sorry you didn’t find it helpful.
    - _Microft 3y ago
      Expecting a tool meant to generate cooking recipes to reject things that aren't usual ingredients of food is not surprising. This tool violates that expectation. Even trivial things like input fields on web forms have a type attribute that lets developers specify which type of content is expected and valid. (If you're not familiar with that, have a look here: [0]). For things that might endanger the health of customers, we can expect better. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        if I tell a piece of software to generate a bleach casserole, it should generate a bleach casserole, because I know what I want better than the software does. anything less would be like clippy telling me Microsoft Word refuses to write my planetary doomsday ransom notes because Microsoft Word is 'meant to write nice things', or my car refusing to exceed the speed limit because it is 'meant to drive legally' maybe I'm just an alien who's capable of drinking bleach, the app doesn't know and it shouldn't have opinions: it should just do what I tell it to do, because it's a "put whatever ingredients you want together" app, not a "this is definitely safe and healthy" app
      - burnished 3y ago
        I think that expectation is only violated if you get unusual/dangerous outputs from innocuous inputs. Just sounding this out but I think the expectation you are responding to is an expectation of an appropriate level of safety, which is more context dependent. For example, do any of the generated recipes actually pose a danger, in that they will participate in harming a human? My hunch is no, this would not present the same kind of danger the 'tide pod challenge' did and would never lead to unusual adverse outcomes (anyone can find out about an allergy from a new ingredient in a recipe for example). Just exploring the topic here though. I think the perspective that a 'meal planner' should never produce plainly hazardous meal plans is perfectly rational.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yreg 3y ago
I don't see why it shouldn't. Let me put in any input I want to. There's no story here.
soco 3y ago
If you are a "technology enthusiast" you will blame everything but the technology for failures. Is this the first time? Definitely not, we all have the running jokes of "it works on my machine" or "damn users if they only" or "it's not a bug but a feature" developer-developed blindness, where the stupid real world keeps interfering with our perfect creations.
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  You are conflating things. If you sell a product for profit, it needs to be foolproof, so the general public can use it without shooting themselves in the foot. Capable tools have to be gatekept somehow, either through actual hard licenses or soft gates of obscure forums, hidden small communities that don't advertise themselves to the world, so they can do their thing in peace. The trouble comes when the latter kinds of communities build something useful/fun-when-used-correctly and it leaks and people demand to participate, complain that it's too hard and demand it be dumbed down. So yeah, don't broadcast your stuff to the mainstream unless it's foolproof. But also, let people be, who are satisfied with dealing with the rough-edges stuff. This is true in many contexts. Think about enthusiasts of weird drugs or other niche communities like sword swallowers. There's no principle of "you are only allowed to do things that are also safe when ignorantly attempted by a random person".

OK, ... so you rather justify a recipe app accepting chemicals as inputs to blame a news site for their reporting than to identify the problem? Edit: removed a part about The Guardian.

Aachen 3y ago

I'm not sure what the ability to blame the Guardian has to do with anything, I'm basing the above comment solely on this submitted article and don't really know the Guardian as an organisation. I have no beef with them, if I'm reading your tone correctly. As for allowing to input chemicals: garbage in, garbage out. We accept that from tools (and some countries from guns) but not from software. Maybe that's how it should be, but I find it an interesting discrepancy. In general, as a hacker, I'm happy if a tool lets me use it for unintended purposes (such as humor in this case)

_Microft 3y ago
OK, I took The Guardian part out but I think the rest is still applicable. Why is the reporting problematic but not that this problem happens in the first place?
- veave 3y ago
  Because there's no story. It's software that generates recipes from ingredients you provide. If you provide inedible ingredients you get an inedible recipe. What did you expect would happen? The subtext here is journalists who are dead scared of a tool they know will replace them. So they have to denigrate it.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    I think something that's been left unsaid until now is that the implementation is clumsy and downright dangerous, therefore the implementation is totally botched. A supermarket whose job it is to feed people so as to keep them alive is a vital service in the vast majority of economies, and so has the duty to go a little deeper and fine-tune their model or at the very least heavily prompt-engineer their interface layer to avoid such obvious flubs. There's no point in apologizing for the LLM. Of course it's doing what it's asked to do. That's not the gripe, nor points toward any kind of solution, though.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    I agree with the first paragraph but not necessarily the latter. More likely to me seems that the journalists see something that can be construed to be harmful (so they can justify the story), as well as having a high click rate (see, it ends up on HN), and thus good for business
    - saaaaaam 3y ago
      A lot of Guardian readers excoriate the Daily Mail as low quality clickbait and "not journalism", whilst seeming perfectly content to suckle from the teats of the Guardian's own clickbait farm, presumably comforting themselves that there is some sort of intellectual honesty present in the Guardian that is missing from the Daily Mail. I find it quite strange.
      - Aachen 3y ago
        Not sure this "us vs. them" stuff / generalising every reader of a website is helping anyone here
        saaaaaam 3y ago
        Not to be pernickety, but I did say “a lot of” not “all of”… And in the context of this conversation which was about clickbait on the guardian I felt it was a contextually valid observation. I’m sorry you didn’t find it helpful.
  - _Microft 3y ago
    Expecting a tool meant to generate cooking recipes to reject things that aren't usual ingredients of food is not surprising. This tool violates that expectation. Even trivial things like input fields on web forms have a type attribute that lets developers specify which type of content is expected and valid. (If you're not familiar with that, have a look here: [0]). For things that might endanger the health of customers, we can expect better. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      if I tell a piece of software to generate a bleach casserole, it should generate a bleach casserole, because I know what I want better than the software does. anything less would be like clippy telling me Microsoft Word refuses to write my planetary doomsday ransom notes because Microsoft Word is 'meant to write nice things', or my car refusing to exceed the speed limit because it is 'meant to drive legally' maybe I'm just an alien who's capable of drinking bleach, the app doesn't know and it shouldn't have opinions: it should just do what I tell it to do, because it's a "put whatever ingredients you want together" app, not a "this is definitely safe and healthy" app
    - burnished 3y ago
      I think that expectation is only violated if you get unusual/dangerous outputs from innocuous inputs. Just sounding this out but I think the expectation you are responding to is an expectation of an appropriate level of safety, which is more context dependent. For example, do any of the generated recipes actually pose a danger, in that they will participate in harming a human? My hunch is no, this would not present the same kind of danger the 'tide pod challenge' did and would never lead to unusual adverse outcomes (anyone can find out about an allergy from a new ingredient in a recipe for example). Just exploring the topic here though. I think the perspective that a 'meal planner' should never produce plainly hazardous meal plans is perfectly rational.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

yreg 3y ago

I don't see why it shouldn't. Let me put in any input I want to. There's no story here.

soco 3y ago

If you are a "technology enthusiast" you will blame everything but the technology for failures. Is this the first time? Definitely not, we all have the running jokes of "it works on my machine" or "damn users if they only" or "it's not a bug but a feature" developer-developed blindness, where the stupid real world keeps interfering with our perfect creations.

bonoboTP 3y ago
You are conflating things. If you sell a product for profit, it needs to be foolproof, so the general public can use it without shooting themselves in the foot. Capable tools have to be gatekept somehow, either through actual hard licenses or soft gates of obscure forums, hidden small communities that don't advertise themselves to the world, so they can do their thing in peace. The trouble comes when the latter kinds of communities build something useful/fun-when-used-correctly and it leaks and people demand to participate, complain that it's too hard and demand it be dumbed down. So yeah, don't broadcast your stuff to the mainstream unless it's foolproof. But also, let people be, who are satisfied with dealing with the rough-edges stuff. This is true in many contexts. Think about enthusiasts of weird drugs or other niche communities like sword swallowers. There's no principle of "you are only allowed to do things that are also safe when ignorantly attempted by a random person".